Assessing the Effectiveness of an Email Marketing Campaign

As is the case with the majority of marketing practices, one of the most essential aspects of an email marketing campaign is measuring its effectiveness.

It is through this analysis that the business waging the campaign is able to ensure they are acting positively, getting the desired results and can make any necessary changes as and where appropriate.

With this in mind, there are a number of ways of measuring the results of the practice.

Inbox arrival

As is the case with any advertising or marketing medium, one of the best ways of assessing the effectiveness is to assess how many customers have received the message. In the case of email marketing, this is measured by the number of customers who have received the email into their inbox.

Many free email providers have spam filters and uninvited emails may land here by mistake. Many people check their spam or trash cans on a regular basis to ensure that no emails have landed there by mistake and some providers (such as GMAIL) alert their customers when they have flagged a message as spam so that the customer can check for themselves.

However, the easiest way of avoiding the dreaded trash can is to ensure that customers have signed up for the campaign and are expecting messages.

Targeting a demographic

Rather than sending out a general or blanket email which invites all customers, many businesses choose to send out targeted emails to certain groups of customers which gives them a better chance of receiving a reply from a smaller number of customers.

It might be that the business has a separate filter for new and existing customers or one which only targets customers who have brought certain services in the past and sends them details of similar products or services.

Targeted emails allow the business to much more easily assess the amount of return business.

Assessing

The key with any marketing campaign is to weigh the results against the amount of effort which was put into the campaign. Sending out emails to 1000 customers and receiving 1 enquiry or sale as a result might seem like a poor result but when analysed, if it took five minutes to send out those emails and the result was £1000 worth of business which might not have otherwise existed then the result might be seen in a more positive light. The key is to view and assess the results in context and consider them on a regular basis. This will give the business in question a much better opportunity of making any changes which might be necessary and tweak the campaign so that it is more successful and profitable in the future.

Testing

The golden rule for the majority of marketing campaigns is to test them first. For this reason, many businesses start by targeting a small control group and assessing those results before they roll out to a larger audience. This gives them a better opportunity of getting their campaign right before they “go public”.

Comments

About Debajyoti Banerjee

Debajyoti Banerjee is Founder & CEO at Seven Boats Info-System- a leading strategic Internet Marketing company, Digital Marketing Trainer, Entrepreneur, Web Strategist & Internet Marketing Consultant in Kolkata area, India. Deba helps other businesses to transform their online presence, to attract new leads and to convert their prospects by his expert web consultancy. Get in touch with him on Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn or Twitter